Leeland and the sword of faith

I ventured out to see Leeland last night. I was kinda pumped, I like Leeland, musically, vocally and lyrically. They are one of the 'fresher' bands on the worship/CHR music lists. Frankly I think a lot of their lyrics hit home just because of their age group and who they're writing to.

I got into the place after Brandon told me it was part of a conference to find out who was putting it on, Gideon's Army. I don't mean this in a condemning or mocking way, but it was a charismatic event. (insert pause here). Unfortunately every charismatic event that I have had the pleasure of taking part in have seriously been the most awkward things I've ever seen. There are a lot of things you can point fingers at in 'Christianity' and say that is why people think we're nut jobs, this would be one of them.

I'll dive into the technical aspects first. We walk in to see a jib (that wasn't being used for the concert) sitting in the back, cool except it was covered in gaff tape and was a little chincy...oh boy. Secondly we notice the IMAG screen (yes singular, one not two) that had a live single camera feed with the gideon's army logo and some text overlayed. The music lyrics were overlayed in the same fashion and it really seemed the lady was typing them up as the song went on because they were not instantaneous. The text was a serif and was tiny tiny. There wasn't really ANY front lighting for video except for the bright white and blue lights coming out of the movers they had. The sound, well...that was intersting, the right speaker cluster wasn't on through the first song, brandon had to go let the sound guy know it wasn't engaged. Vocal's weren't real audible and it was very hollow(and a lot of bass, the room was a conference room too which didn't help). Back to lighting, the inteligent lights had about 2-3 moves and most of the light got thrown onto the cieling which made no sense to me. One more thing that was a nail in the coffin. They stopped everything to show a video on relief efforts going on in Galveston, cool, except the video made me feel like I was on an acid trip. The computer running the WONDERFUL graphics was A) a PC, B) extremely UNDER powered and C) MIRRORED. If you're in the tech world these three things on their own are bad enough but all together = a disaster. So you saw the person end the program and go back to the desktop and open up windows media player to start the video and they struggled to get it full screen. It was at this poin that I noticed the screen was not keystoned in any sense of the word. Once the video played it started chugging, in essence the computer could not keep up with the audio/video, so the audio seemed to seriously lag, and it was extremely choppy. The guy talked slow to begin with, and the audio/music was aweful. So out of 5 stars i give a .5 on tech crew.

Ok I would go on to part two of this blog and talk about the atmosphere but I don't actually have any time to go on to that...

So I end part one with this, Christian events end up extremely sub par in the tech/creative field and this is one thing that we get laughed at for. You cannot be taken seriously any more if you don't step up your game. Just throwing money at something does not necesarily make it quailty either, time, effort and experience come largely into play as well.